How humans are trying to reclaim their urban habitat.
Let’s start with an example: the art of skateboarding has a long tradition of »misusing« human built urban infrastructure. They do have a whole different perspective and appreciation for it. For them a normal bench is not a object to sit on, except they make a break, a bench is a possibility to express their style of skateboarding. They interact with it in different forms like jumps and tricks for example to slide on it in a specific way and combine it with other artistic movements. Page XX shows us a step further. The collective »stokels« is not only using infrastructure they also modify it to make it possible to skate on it. Out of this two practices the street skateboarding culture has been developed, they mostly get perceived as loud, rebellious and non-conform. A couple of days later the modification built by the collective got destroyed again. The destruction and disturbance is a frequent phenomenon of such attempts.
The misuse and modification is a problem in the perspective of the municipal administration and landlords. One subtle way of dealing with this »problem« is to municipal built places to skate. This attempt will concentrate the culture on one place and will conform this rebellious practice by giving them a habitat wich imitates urban infrastructure. By this, security services and police institutions will have a better lever to oppress further streets skateboarding attempts by saying »there is a place for skateboarding, go there.« A example for this is the ban of skatebosarding around the church cathedral in cologne with the reference for nearby built skatepark. With municipal built skateparks further attempts of street skateboarding could be interpreted as that they don’t want to be controlled other and don’t accept their »false« offers.
Another example of appropriation are just simple dirt trails next to paved routes. In these cases the municipal or landlord built ways aren’t preferred. People manifested their own way in going off the track.
Another case off the track is the form of political action by occupation of trees(witch can last for years) within the area of extending fossil-capitalist extraction and infrastructure. The Documentary “XXXXX” shows us such a attempt, the occupation, started in 2022, wanted to blockade the plan of the German government to extend a express road and destroying parts of a recreation area followed by years of a noisy building site. Extending road infrastructure in times of climate crisis and a much needed transformation of individual transportation to public transportation. One side effect of such spaces is that they could try out other form of living. During this action the collective is controlling the area in a lot of aspects and is having their own structures of living witch is rarity for most people living small isolated anonymous flats. They organise their political struggle and the living together by consensus decision making. They share most of their resources, search for food and building material in supermarket bins and on the streets collectively, organise reproductive work like cooking food for everyone instead of every individual is cooking for themself. The occupation got evicted by the police in January 2024.
Ein Film über Verkehrswende, Bäume besetzen und Klimagerechtigkeit.
The examples in this project shows us the human desire for shaping their environment and questioning the status quo with their constructive practices. How would humans shape their world if they would collectively have more geographical area, different forms of capacities like money and time and wouldn’t get restricted by governments, landowners, municipal administrations.